Brace Yourself, My Dear — Mostly Harmless

TUOL SLENG. Strychnine Hill. S-21. In Pol Pot’s hidden prison they had turned classrooms into torture chambers.

One of more than 150 execution centers established by the Khmer Rouge, S-21 saw an estimated 20,000 prisoners from 1976 to 1979. Tens of thousands were tortured until they gave up the names of friends, family members, co-workers, who were then arrested, tortured and killed, but not before they gave up names themselves.

The Khmer Rouge were looking for dissenters, counter-revolutionaries, anyone who posed a threat to the new establishment of the recently overthrown country of Cambodia.

In 1975, the year my older sister was born, the Khmer Rouge took advantage of a power vacuum created by secret U.S. bombings, and captured Phnom Penh. The U.S. was after Vietnamese communists and didn’t take any precautions to dodge Cambodian (or Laotian) communities, ecosystems or antiquities.

Establishing a new government, the Kampuchean People’s Republic, Pol Pot, a persuasive lunatic with an inferiority complex, declared his new nation’s history to be at “Year Zero”.

These ten rules were reproduced in English for demonstration purposes. Number six is heartbreaking, knowing how many children were held here.

Cities were evacuated. Citizens were forced to live on and farm the land. Pol Pot wanted a rural utopia, that excluded money, religion, and property. Modern technology was banished. Doctors, teachers, scientists, and academics were most vulnerable. Anyone caught reading, or even simply wearing glasses was regarded an ‘intellectual’, apprehended, and most likely killed. If you spoke another language you learned to keep it to yourself for fear of being executed - immediately.

Mugshots were taken of each new prisoner, and thousands of these haunting photographs survived. Most women and girls sport the same short bobbed haircut, a mandated style. Some already wear the official Khmer outfit - all black with a red checked scarf. The faces staring back know the end is near.

The Khmer Rouge kept detailed records of each prisoner that passed through Tuol Sleng and the Genocide Museum has hundreds of their photos on display.

The first year at S-21 prisoners were killed and buried on-site, but with bodies piling up on the small plot of land in central Phnom Penh, a new solution was found 15km outside of town. Soon victims were driven to Choeung Ek, better known today as ‘The Killing Fields’, for extermination, usually by blunt force to save valuable ammunition. After all, there was a war going on.

Shallow mass graves held as many as 100 bodies, totaling nearly 9,000 individuals with hopes, dreams, and fears. One grave, lined with a bamboo fence strewn with colorful bracelets, once held nothing but women and children. A tree nearby used as an instrument in their execution.

Bracelets left by visitors to the Killing Fields around a mass grave where only the bodies of women and children were found.

Today a Buddhist stupa holding more than 5,000 human skulls - some cracked, some crushed - memorializes those lost. Walking around the site, visitors can’t help but tread on bone fragments that still resurface with each rain.

A modern-day sign at Choeung Ek, keeping visitors off of unmarked grave sites.

Out of the estimated 20,000 prisoners at S-21, there were only twelve known survivors. Overall, between 1.5 and 3 million people, nearly 25% of the Cambodian population, was exterminated. Pol Pot died of natural causes at age 78 while under house arrest, comfortable in his own bed.

His last declaration to the world was, “My conscience is clear.”

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VERDICT: Mostly Harmless today, but that was not the case for Cambodians in the very recent past.